"The title, taken from artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's contribution, pertains to the overall sense of "indeterminacy" and "boundlessness" in the chosen works of 26 female artists, each introduced by personal, inspirational, or abstract quotations. Many works are highly effective, especially in this format, which successfully depicts all media, including photography, painting, and installation. Though it is arguably Louise Bourgeois who epitomizes the "image+text" creed with the affecting and darkly humorous "He Disappeared Into Complete Silence." Narrative is key, celebrating the "beauty in banality," whether in Adrian Piper's engaging personal account as part of her "Political Self-Portrait" series, Suzanne Treister's social commentary in "Alchemy," or the absurdist prose of "India Notebooks" by Bhanu and Rohini Kapil. Race, gender, sexuality, politics, and literature are prominent, best exemplified in Jane Hammond's "Fallen," an ode to soldiers in Iraq. Pearson outlines her own gender philosophies in art, along with the criteria for her self-confessed "surprising selection," omitting "obvious choices," to create an introspective, free-flowing collection that "will incite more questions than answers." Such is the nature of art, and a testament to this fine anthology." --Publishers Weekly, May 16, 2011

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"It is almost that evokes the humming state of the not-quite-this-and-not-quite-that, a state that conjures an awareness of what accepted categories cannot contain, what familiar taxonomies cannot order, what one medium cannot express, what a single language cannot circumscribe. It is something, in other words, that can never be just that—fully one thing or another, wholly belonging here or there: something then mutable, indeterminate, ineffable. And the phrase it is almost that, in its indeterminacy, signals the many things something may or may not be—and may or may not become—simultaneously. It is almost that points to the inverse of lack—to boundlessness." –Lisa Pearson, excerpted from the Afterword to It Is Almost That: A Collection of Image and Text Work by Women Artists & Writers

It Is Almost That

A Collection of Image & Text Work by Women Artists & Writers

Published by SiglioEdited by Lisa Pearson.

A marvelously bold interdisciplinary anthology, It Is Almost That collects works by women artists and writers who have constructed hybrid environments that merge image and text. The works in this collection are supremely imaginative in both form and content: from the semi-autobiographical novel painted by a young artist who died in the Holocaust (Charlotte Salomon) to Alison Knowles' computer-generated chance operation for "imagining" houses and their inhabitants; from the pseudo-scientific examination of a conversation between a mother and a daughter (Eleanor Antin) to the dark, comic interrogation of violence against women (Sue Williams); from the transformations of newspaper headlines (Suzanne Treister) to the probing of animal consciousness (Cole Swensen & Shari De Graw); from the body maps drawn by South African women with AIDS (Bambanani Women's Group) to the alchemical transformation of the pregnant body into an evolving landscape and philosophical meditation (Susan Hiller). Other contributors to It Is Almost That include Fiona Banner, Louise Bourgeois, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Cozette de Charmoy, Ann Hamilton, Jane Hammond, Dorothy Iannone, Bhanu and Rohini Kapil, Helen Kim, Ketty La Rocca, Bernadette Mayer, Adrian Piper, Charlotte Salomon, Genevičve Seillé, Molly Springfield, Erica Van Horn & Laurie Clark, Carrie Mae Weems, Hannah Weiner and Unica Zürn.

Featured image, reproduced from Unica Zürn's The House of Illness (1958), is reproduced from It Is Almost That: A Collection of Image and Text Work by Women Artists & Writers, published by Lisa Pearson of Siglio press. "Written and drawn during a bout of fever induced by jaundice, The House of Illness (Das Haus der Krankenheiten traverses a kind of mirror-world in which happiness is torment, traps are set to improve one's health, and mortal enemies attack their victims with virulent love."

PRAISE AND REVIEWS

Publishers Weekly

Pearson outlines her own gender philosophies in art, along with the criteria for her self-confessed "surprising selection," omitting "obvious choices," to create an introspective, free-flowing collection that "will incite more questions than answers." Such is the nature of art, and a testament to this fine anthology.

Bookforum

Chris Kraus

The title of this surprising collection of image/text works by twenty-five female visual artists and writers is a phrase borrowed from a 1977 artwork by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. As Lisa Pearson writes in her afterword, It Is Almost That describes "the humming state of the not-quite this and not quite that," namely, "what familiar taxonomies cannot order." Hak Kyung Cha's piece-composed of faltering phrases projected on black-and-white slides-points to the provisional nature of language and speech. While Pearson's penchant for this open, indeterminate state might seem at first to evoke categories like ecriture feminine, twentieth-century Language-school poetry, or non-diegetic experimental filmmaking, her selections, works produced over a span of seventy-one years from Charlotte Salomon's 1940 visual novel Life? Or Theater? A Song Play to Bhanu & Rohini Kapil's 2011 India Notebooks, defy easy classification.Chris Kraus - Bookforum, Jun. 6, 2011

Poetry Foundation

Eileen Miles

Intuitively and practically speaking, This Is Almost That is, in effect, a handbook. It, by presenting female art history, shows us how to be an artist. Each career here, whether its arc is short or long, presents a new kind of way.

Modern Women: Women Artists at The Museum of Modern Art Edited by Cornelia Butler, Alexandra Schwartz. Introductions by Cornelia Butler, Griselda Pollock, Aruna D'Souza. This landmark survey represents the first effort by a major North American museum to examine its collection by highlighting the production of modern and contemporary women artists. Featuring essays by nearly 50 writers, including both >>more The Museum of Modern Art, New YorkISBN 9780870707711US $65.00 CAN $65.00 TRADEHbk, 9 x 10.5 in. / 512 pgs / 400 color.Pub Date: 06/30/2010 Active/In stock

It Is Almost ThatA Collection of Image & Text Work by Women Artists & WritersEdited by Lisa Pearson.

A marvelously bold interdisciplinary anthology, It Is Almost That collects works by women artists and writers who have constructed hybrid environments that merge image and text. The works in this collection are supremely imaginative in both form and content: from the semi-autobiographical novel painted by a young artist who died in the Holocaust (Charlotte Salomon) to Alison Knowles' computer-generated chance operation for "imagining" houses and their inhabitants; from the pseudo-scientific examination of a conversation between a mother and a daughter (Eleanor Antin) to the dark, comic interrogation of violence against women (Sue Williams); from the transformations of newspaper headlines (Suzanne Treister) to the probing of animal consciousness (Cole Swensen & Shari De Graw); from the body maps drawn by South African women with AIDS (Bambanani Women's Group) to the alchemical transformation of the pregnant body into an evolving landscape and philosophical meditation (Susan Hiller). Other contributors to It Is Almost That include Fiona Banner, Louise Bourgeois, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Cozette de Charmoy, Ann Hamilton, Jane Hammond, Dorothy Iannone, Bhanu and Rohini Kapil, Helen Kim, Ketty La Rocca, Bernadette Mayer, Adrian Piper, Charlotte Salomon, Genevičve Seillé, Molly Springfield, Erica Van Horn & Laurie Clark, Carrie Mae Weems, Hannah Weiner and Unica Zürn.